Pie Porn

After making my first really successful crust at Kate McDermott’s Art of the Pie class, I knew I’d need some practice quickly to reinforce what I’d learned. I sent a message to friends: bring me a pie pan and a few bucks and I’ll make you a pie. I got no shortage of takers.
I had roughly two weeks to get through all the pies due to some scheduling snafus, and once I factored in pick-ups, drop-offs, and when I’d have ingredients (like fresh leaf lard), I was confined to just about 6 pies over two weekends. My goal was to get good crust practice, but I learned a few things about the pies along the way too.

Andrea and Marc’s Apple Pie
The first one out the gate was made with Arkansas Black, Pink Cripps, and Waltana Apples from Jerzy Boyz. The leaf lard came from class, and the only other change I made was the kind of vinegar I added to the pie. I didn’t have a great-quality fresh apple cider vinegar but I did have a great raspberry vinegar and that would have to do. The crust was a little drier than I would have liked, and maybe not as crisp on the bottom, but it turned out well. Marc wrote me some comments, which were enormously helpful:

• Overall Impression
  Light, balanced, flavorful, crisp crust, not overly sweet. Yum! The crust was very nearly perfect.
• Crust
  The top crust was flaky, crunchy, even a bit hard. Andy liked the hardness. I prefer a crust that is crisp without being hard. Beyond the crunch, it was very tender and had a great mouth feel. It was just the right thickness all around, and we both loved how it stood up above the apple filling. The flavor was light and the interior of the crust was perfectly flaky. The bottom crust was, in Andy's words, "a little gummy." Definitely did not have the crunch that the top crust had, and short of pre-cooking it, I'm not sure it could. After the first day, the crust lost its crispness and some of the flakiness, and was more what I would call firm. The flavor, however, improved with a day of sitting.
• Filling
  Was not overly sweet, which we both appreciated. I don't recall what kinds of apples you used. The deep red-skinned apple [Note - the Arkansas Black] had a very bitter skin. The other apple had just a faint hint of bitterness to it, but it was in balance with the other flavors. Both apples seemed to be naturally quite sweet. I have a personal preference for a tart apple in the filling (gravensteins are a favorite, but awfully hard to come by), while Andy didn't express a preference. Again, the flavors were artfully balanced, and if not for the naturally bitter skin of the one apple variety, I'd say the filling was very good. Both apples held up pretty well, though the dark-skinned one, while it did hold its shape, got just a bit mushy. The other was close to ideal. On the second day, the bitterness of the dark apple had melded nicely into the rest of the flavors and all had mellowed and blended.

From their pie, I moved on to...

Cat and Lindsay’s Peach Pie
I knew this pie was going to be a little challenging because it’s not peach season. I picked up a giant bag of frozen peaches from Remlinger Farms and went to work on the pie. The peaches, still frozen, didn’t soak up any of the tapioca flour, but I’d seen us add frozen fruit to pies in class and I thought I had enough time to ensure it was baked all the way through.
The dough was better than the first, but it was still too dry when I rolled it. However, all that was lost anyway. The pie baked nearly 80 minutes and still it didn’t boil under the crust (I thought it had, I was wrong). That meant that despite being hot, the tapioca didn’t get hot enough to boil and thicken the juices of the now-defrosted peaches. That also meant a gooey layer of undercooked dough on the bottom and gummy chewy bits on the peaches. Really, this one would have been fine if I hadn’t rushed it out of the oven. Just needed more time to whump.

Joel and Jeri’s Shaker Lemon Pie
I made this pie the same night as I made the peach pie, and it was like night and day. I macerated the thinly cut Meyer lemons for a few hours and the dough was supple – the best I’d made all week. I decided to give this pie a lattice crust because I would handle the dough enough to form one. It turned out beautiful. Jeri made some great observations, especially about the peel:

• And...the pie was d-lish. The crust especially was superb. It was plenty flakey, so I'm shocked that it sat as long as it did. [ed. – it sat in the office for 2 days before it got eaten]
• The filling had the right balance of tart/sweet, too. I also asked B to rate the pie on a scale of 1 to 10 and he gave it a 10. (Pretty impressive; 7-year-olds are tough critics.)
• The only thing I'd consider doing differently is slicing the lemons into smaller pieces (halves, quarters?) for a prettier slice of pie and a less intimidating forkful. I couldn't get a clean slice--it's like the knife was a magnet and the lemons were steel. (Or maybe it's the other way around?)

Tracy’s French Colonial Pie
I got a bit of a surprise when Tracy asked if I could make her something chocolate. I’d had my head in double-crust fruit pies for more than a week, so I was looking forward to a change of pace – but given that I’d never made a chocolate pie before I was a little apprehensive. On National Pie Day, Serious Eats published a list of favorite pies, and from this I got Cakespy's French Colonial Pie. Think French Silk pie with a layer of Bananas Foster. Sounded divine, and Tracy agreed.

My first little hurdle to overcome was the pie pan. In fact, it was a cake pan – so deeper that a pie pan and with straight edges – making blind baking the crust a little more difficult. A few days earlier I’d run out of leaf lard so I called the great folks at Seabreeze Farm and ordered a couple of tubs. On pie day I went to pick it up, but they didn’t have the leaf lard ready yet. I got regular lard instead. He’d said it might be a little more savory, but that it should behave like the leaf. When I started making the crust it was still a little soft, even though I’d let it cool down in the freezer for a couple of hours. I was now dealing with a really soft fat and had to work quickly. I think the dough suffered a bit as a result, but it had a nice flavor. It slid down the pan a bit and melted completely through in a few areas, but it was baked and ready for filling.

Next came the Bananas Foster layer, which I’d chosen to put on the bottom of the pan instead of as a topping on the chocolate layer. I’ve been making Bananas Foster my whole life, but for some reason I chose to follow the directions in the recipe instead of doing it the way I’d always done. The result was dramatically different than what I expected. I usually:

1. Melt the butter in the pan
2. Add the brown sugar
3. Cook until melted and smooth
4. Add bananas and flambé

Instead, I:

1. Melted the brown sugar in a dry pan
2. When it was completely melted, I added the butter
3. Seeing that I didn’t have quite enough sugar, I added more to the pan
4. I noticed the mixture was going too fast. I lowered the temperature, added the bananas and flambéed
5. And then I stirred and stirred, trying to get out the caramelized chunks. I removed the bananas, added a little heavy cream to the pan and I kept stirring

No dice. It had crunchy bits and the bananas were also covered with hard caramel. I figured them might soften a little when I covered them with the chocolate custard, so I layered them into the baked pie crust and covered them with the rest of the caramel sauce, which I had strained.
 
Okay, if I thought the bananas were a complete disaster, I hadn’t prepared myself for the chocolate layer. The recipe is supposed to make two pies, but I used the full amount of filling and it still barely filled half the pie (even though it was a cake pan crust). Maybe my butter wasn’t soft enough or the eggs just didn’t whip up high enough, but this was a thick layer that should have been more like a chocolate mousse. Thank god for that layer of whipped cream to hide it all.

Again, my apologies. This was supposed to be about crust, wasn’t it? Yet here I was apologizing for another crappy pie experience.

Sal and Zoren’s Apple Pie
I dusted myself off after that last debacle and approached one more pie this weekend. Back to where I started, an apple pie. This one, it turned out, worked. It’s got the lard (not the lead lard) crust but it was the same kinds of apples and this week’s first, and with a little more water it held together even better than the first.

The Scraps
By this time, I was done with pies for the month. I had one more to bake, but we couldn’t get the handoff so I put that off for a few weeks. I had enough leftover pie crust scraps to make a tiny apple galette, which I made with Gold Rush apples. Tasted fantastic. And after a break of about a week, I made a deep-dish concord grape pie and it was better than the rest and held together like a champ.

A pie intensive is what I just did, and it really helped me blow through some of my issues with crust. I did a lot of stepping back, lowering my shoulders, and taking a deep breath (thanks, Kate!!). It’s not zen yet, but I shared a lot of pie with a lot of people, and I’m all better for it.

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